Six months after its initial debut, Intel sheds more light on the massively parallel teraflop-on-a-chip project

With no Spring Intel Developer Forum in the U.S., Intel is showing
off its newest technologies this week at the annual Integrated Solid State
Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. At the forefront of Intel’s announcements is its success in developing the world’s first 80-core processor, currently
presented at ISSCC.

Intel’s chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, states "Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone
in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance
forward. It points the way to the near future when Teraflop-capable designs
will be commonplace and will reshape what we can all expect from our computers
and the Internet at home and in the office."

The project until now was previously dubbed Tera-scale at public Intel events. The proper name is now the Intel Teraflops Research Chip -- alluding to the fact the processor can achieve one trillion FLoating-point Operations Per Second. Tera-scale made its first appearance during the Fall 2007 Intel Developer Forum in September 2006. The ISSCC agenda published last month shed more details on the architecture, but this past weekend Intel pulled out most of the stops.

The Teraflops Research Chip is composed of a total of 80 independent
processing cores, which Intel refers to as tiles. The tiles are
organized in rectangular fashion, with 8 tiles placed across and 10 down,
adding up to a total of 80.

Each individual tile in the chip features a processing
engine (PE) and a 5-port router. The router passes data and
instructions to other tiles, while the processing engine, as the name
indicates, processes data. To save power, each processing engine can power
down independently of its router, meaning that a tile can theoretically only be
used to pass data when its processing engine is not needed. The
processing engine can then be turned on to process additional data on-demand. Intel's guidance claims the processor can achieve one teraflops performance on just 62W of power.

The chip itself uses an LGA package similar to Intel’s Core
2 and Pentium 4 processors. A clear difference, however, is that is uses 1248
pins in place of 775. Intel's guidance states that 343 pins are used for signaling, while the rest are used
for power and ground.

The minimum clock speed the chip needs to run at in order to
process one teraflop is 3.16 GHz per core at 0.95V, but Intel's guidance already alludes at frequencies in excess of 5.7 GHz. Performance, at this time, appears linear; a 5.7 GHz Teraflops Research Chip has an output of 1.81 teraflops.

Intel has large plans for its Teraflops Research Chip. The
primary purpose of the chip and project is less to make record
performances, and more to serve as a vessel to test future Intel technologies.
The next major technologies Intel will be implementing in the Tera-scale
research project will be 3-D stacked memory and introducing more general purpose and capable cores.

A major limitation of the current 80-core chip is that it is
not based on the X86 architecture. Instead, it uses a 96-bit Very Long
Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture, another architecture currently used in the Itanium server processors. A major hurdle that Intel hinted at will be moving from VLIW to X86 on its 80-core chip.

Although Intel currently has no plans to commercialize the
80-core chip, technologies used in it will definitely be making their way into
multi-core desktop chips. So how long until the technologies are expected to
finally come to fruition? Intel estimates that it will take 5 – 10 years until
we actually begin seeing the benefits of the Tera-scale research project.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007